Virtual worlds of entertainment win real popularity

Sir: According to your leader column (16 January), players of The Sims Online should "get a (real) life".
In November, I gave the keynote presentation at the "State of Play" conference at New York Law School. This conference was a highly successful get-together of lawyers, economists and virtual world designers, conceived to address the overlap between real and virtual life. These are issues that will become increasingly important as people more progressive than your leader-writer increasingly switch to virtual worlds as a primary source of entertainment.
More people are playing in virtual worlds right now than live in Ireland. There are several individual virtual worlds that have more players than this newspaper has readers (Lineage in Korea has more than two million players; EverQuest, in North America and Europe, has around 430,000). When these kinds of numbers of people are involved, "virtual" is "real".

Instead of taking a pot shot at people for being upset when what they perceive as their right to free speech in a virtual world is withdrawn, you should instead be asking why it is that free speech rules do not apply in virtual worlds. You might also ponder on what it is about virtual worlds that causes so many people to prefer them to the real one.

Dr RICHARD A BARTLE
Principal Fellow, Computer Game Design,
University of Essex, West Bergholt, Essex